The Freedom Artist

An impassioned plea for freedom and justice, set in a world uncomfortably like our own. In Ben Okri’s most significant novel since the Man Booker-winning The Famished Road, a young woman is arrested for speaking four simple words - Who is the Prisoner? This question resonates throughout the novel, and by the end it has become the question every reader has to ask themselves. The answer is implicit in the revelation at the heart of the story.

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is the long-awaited new story collection from Denis Johnson, author of the groundbreaking, highly acclaimed Jesus’ Son. Written in the same luminous prose, this collection finds Johnson in new territory, contemplating mortality, the ghosts of the past, and the elusive and unexpected ways the mysteries of the universe assert themselves. Finished shortly before Johnson’s death, this collection is the last word from a writer whose work will live on for many years to come.

The Friend

When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building. Winner of the 2018 National Book Award.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter - and he always works alone. But when he is engaged to find a child who disappeared three years ago, he must break his own rules, joining a group of eight very different mercenaries working together to find the boy. Drawing from vivid African history and mythology, Marlon James - previous winner of the Man Booker prize - weaves a saga of breathtaking adventure and powerful intrigue.

The Orchardist's Daughter

Sixteen-year-old Mikaela has grown up isolated and homeschooled on an apple orchard in southeastern Tasmania, until an unexpected event shatters her family. Eighteen months later, she and her older brother Kurt are running a small business in a timber town. Miki longs to make connections and spend more time in her beloved forest, but she is kept a virtual prisoner by Kurt, who leads a secret life of his own.

Among the Lost

In the desolate wastelands between the sierra and the jungle, under an all-seeing, unforgiving sun, a single day unfolds as relentlessly as those that have gone before. People are trafficked and brutalised, illegal migrants are cheated of their money, their dreams, their very names, even as countless others scrabble to cross the border, trying to reach a land they call El Paraíso.

The Wall

Kavanagh begins his life patrolling the Wall. If he's lucky, if nothing goes wrong, he only has two years of this, 729 more nights. He will soon find out what Defenders do and who the Others are. But somewhere, in the dark cave of his mind, he thinks: wouldn't it be interesting if something did happen, if they came, if you had to fight for your life?

Half Moon Lake

'They said he was their boy. And so he was…’ In 1913, on a summer’s day at Half Moon Lake, Louisiana, four-year-old Sonny Davenport walks into the woods and never returns. Then, at the moment when all hope seems lost, the boy is found in the company of a tramp. But is he truly Sonny Davenport? The circumstances of his discovery raise more questions than answers. And when Grace Mill, an unwed farm worker, travels from Alabama to lay claim to the child, newspapers, townsfolk, even the Davenports' own friends, take sides.

An Orchestra of Minorities

Umuahia, Nigeria. Chinonso, a young poultry farmer, sees a woman attempting to jump to her death from a highway bridge. Horrified by her recklessness, Chinonso joins her on the roadside and hurls two of his most prized chickens into the water below to demonstrate the severity of the fall.

In this contemporary twist of Homer’s Odyssey, in the mythic style of the Igbo literary tradition, Chigozie Obioma weaves a heart-wrenching epic about the tension between destiny and determination.

Unsheltered

2016 Vineland: meet Willa Knox, a woman who stands braced against a world that seems to hold no mercy for her shattered life and family. Thatcher Greenwood, the new science teacher, is a fervent advocate of the work of Charles Darwin and is keen to communicate his ideas to his students. But those in power in Thatcher's small town have no desire for a new world order and both are asked to pay a high price for their courage. Unsheltered explores the foundations we build in life, spanning time and place to give us all a clearer look at those around us.

Love is Blind

When Brodie is offered a job in Paris, he seizes the chance to flee Edinburgh and his tyrannical clergyman father, and begin a wildly different new chapter in his life. In Paris, a fateful encounter with a famous pianist irrevocably changes his future - and sparks an obsessive love affair with a beautiful Russian soprano, Lika Blum.

Call Me Evie

Meet Evie, a young woman held captive by a man named Jim in the isolated New Zealand beach town of Maketu. Jim says he's hiding Evie to protect her, that she did something terrible back home in Melbourne. Jim says he's keeping her safe. Evie's not sure she can trust Jim, but can she trust her own memories? An incredible literary thriller from an exciting new Australian voice.

The Binding

Emmett Farmer is working in the fields when a letter arrives summoning him to begin an apprenticeship as a Bookbinder, a vocation that arouses fear, superstition and prejudice. He will learn to hand-craft beautiful volumes, and within each he will capture something unique and extraordinary: a memory.

Fire and Blood

Set 300 years before the events in A Song of Ice and Fire, Fire and Blood is the definitive history of the Targaryens in Westeros as told by Archmaester Gyldayn, and chronicles the conquest that united the Seven Kingdoms under Targaryen rule through to the Dance of the Dragons: the Targaryen civil war that nearly ended their dynasty forever.

The Lost Man

The man lay still in the centre of a dusty grave under a monstrous sky. Two brothers meet at the border of their vast cattle properties under the unrelenting sun of outback Queensland. They are at the stockman's grave, a landmark so old, no one can remember who is buried there. But today, the scant shadow it casts was the last chance for their middle brother, Cameron. The Bright family's quiet existence is thrown into grief and anguish. Something had been troubling Cameron. Did he lose hope and walk to his death? Because if he didn't, the isolation of the outback leaves few suspects.

Shortlisted for indie Book Awards 2019.

Bridge of Clay

Let me tell you about our brother. The fourth Dunbar boy is named Clay. The Dunbar boys bring each other up in a house run by their own rules. A family of ramshackle tragedy - their mother is dead, their father has fled - they love and fight and learn to reckon with the adult world. It is Clay who will build a bridge - for his family, for his past, for greatness, for his sins.

Markus Zusak is the bestselling author of six novels, including The Book Thief and The Messenger.

Shortlisted for indie Book Awards 2019.

Best Summer Stories

New stories from Tony Birch, Stephanie Biship, Chris Womersley, Paddy O'Reilly, Michael Mohammed Ahmad and many others. This brilliant collection continues Black Inc's long tradition of discovering and celebrating the country's finest writers, with memorable tales that will stay with you long after reading. A collection that makes a perfect holiday gift.

Milkman

Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes ‘interesting’.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2018.

Killing Commendatore

In Killing Commendatore, a thirty-something portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a strange painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious thirteen-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna, a pit in the woods behind the artist's home, and an underworld haunted by Double Metaphors.

The End #6 My Struggle

The End is the sixth and final book in the monumental My Struggle cycle. Here, Karl Ove Knausgaard examines life, death, love and literature with unsparing rigour and begins to count the cost of his project.This last volume reflects on the fallout from the earlier books, with Knausgaard facing the pressures of literary acclaim and its often shattering repercussions. My Struggle is a project freighted with risk, where the bounds between private and public worlds are tested, not without penalty for the author himself and those around him.

Normal People

Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in rural Ireland. The similarities end there; they are from very different worlds. When they both earn places at Trinity College in Dublin, a connection that has grown between them lasts long into the following years. This is an exquisite love story about how a person can change another person's life - a simple yet profound realisation that unfolds beautifully over the course of the novel. Alternating menace with overwhelming tenderness, Sally Rooney's second novel breathes fiction with new life.

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018.

Paris Echo

American postdoctoral researcher Hannah and runaway Moroccan teenager Tariq have little in common, yet both are susceptible to the daylight ghosts of Paris. Hannah listens to the extraordinary witness of women who were present under the German Occupation; in her desire to understand their lives and through them her own, she finds a city bursting with clues and connections. Out in the migrant suburbs, Tariq is searching for a mother he barely knew. For him in his innocence each boulevard, Metro station and street corner is a source of surprise.

Transcription

1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathisers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. Ten years later, now a producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat.

Wintering

When Jessica's partner disappears into the dark Tasmanian forest, there is of course the mystery of what happened to him - the deserted car, the enigmatic final image recorded on his phone. There is the strange circle of local women, widows of disappeared men, with their edgy fellowship and unhinged theories. And the forest itself- looming hugely over this tiny settlement on the remote tip of the island. For her own sanity, Jessica needs to know two things. Who was Matthew? And who - or what - has he become?

Lethal White #4 Cormoran Strike

When Billy, a troubled young man, comes to private eye Cormoran Strike's office to ask for his help investigating a crime he thinks he witnessed as a child, Strike is left deeply unsettled. During this labyrinthine investigation, Strike's own life is far from straightforward: his newfound fame as a private eye means he can no longer operate behind the scenes as he once did. Plus, his relationship with his former assistant is more fraught than it ever has been - Robin is now invaluable to Strike in the business, but their personal relationship is much, much more tricky than that.

The Silence of the Girls

The great city of Troy is under siege as Greek heroes Achilles and Agamemnon wage bloody war over a stolen woman. In the Greek camp, another woman is watching and waiting- Briseis. She was a queen of this land but now she is Achilles' concubine- a prize of battle. Briseis is just one among thousands of women backstage in this war - the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead - all of them voiceless in history. But, though no one knows it yet, they are just ten weeks away from the death of Achilles and the Fall of Troy, an end to this long and bitter conflict. Briseis will see it all - and she will bear witness.

The Shepherd's Hut

Jaxie dreads going home. His mum's dead. The old man bashes him without mercy, and he wishes he was an orphan. But no one's ever told Jaxie Clackton to be careful what he wishes for. In one terrible moment his life is stripped to little more than what he can carry and how he can keep himself alive. There's just one person left in the world who understands him and what he still dares to hope for. But to reach her he'll have to cross the vast saltlands on a trek that only a dreamer or a fugitive would attempt.

The Shepherd's Hut is a searing look at what it takes to keep love and hope alive in a parched and brutal world.

Shortlisted for indie Book Awards 2019.

Warlight

It is 1945, and London is still reeling from the Blitz and years of war. 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, are apparently abandoned by their parents, left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they get to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women with a shared history, all of whom seem determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be?

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018.

Less

Who says you can’t run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can’t say yes-it would be too awkward-and you can’t say no-it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world...

This is a scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize 2018.

Flames

Flames is a version of Tasmania where the landscape has a voice, a history, an impact on the lives of its inhabitants. A young man named Levi McAllister decides to build a coffin for his twenty-three-year-old sister, Charlotte - who promptly runs for her life. A water rat swims upriver in quest of the cloud god. A fisherman named Karl hunts for tuna in partnership with a seal. And a father takes form from fire. The answers to these riddles are to be found in this tale of grief and love and the bonds of family, tracing a journey across the southern island that takes us full circle. Flames sings out with joy and sadness. Utterly original in conception, spellbinding in its descriptions of nature and its celebration of the power of language, it announces the arrival of a thrilling new voice in contemporary fiction.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend. One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted - while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she’s avoided all her life. Change can be good. Change can be bad. But surely any change is better than… fine?

An astonishing debut that powerfully depicts the loneliness of life, and the simple power of a little kindness.

Winner of the Costa First Book Prize 2017.

First Person

Kif Kehlmann, a young penniless writer, is rung in the middle of the night by the notorious con man and corporate criminal, Siegfried Heidl. About to go to trial for defrauding the banks of $700 million, Heidl offers Kehlmann the job of ghostwriting his memoir. He has six weeks to write the book, for which he'll be paid $10,000. But as the writing gets under way, Kehlmann begins to fear that he is being corrupted by Heidl. As the deadline draws closer, he becomes ever more unsure if he is ghostwriting a memoir, or if Heidl is rewriting him - his life, his future. Everything that was certain grows uncertain as he begins to wonder- who is Siegfried Heidl - and who is Kif Kehlmann? As time runs out, one question looms above all others- what is the truth? By turns compelling, comic, and chilling, this is a haunting journey into the heart of our age.

Bridget Crack

Van Diemen's Land, 1826. Bridget Crack is a convict servant in Hobart Town, with a cruel master and a desperate urge to change her fortune. Running from her precarious existence into Tasmania's wilderness, she faces some fates worse than what she is running from. Can she survive a brutish escape amongst bushrangers and unknown threats? What will she have to do to survive?